No wonder we fear and hate children

One Saturday afternoon ten years ago I was walking down Chiswick High Road, a leafy and pleasant part of west London, when I spotted two boys, aged 11 or maybe 12, throwing stones at a shop window. An elderly Polish lady in her 80s, decrepit and shuffling, with bad eyesight and a crooked back, was telling them off. As I walked closer they aggressively squared up to her, forehead to nose, both arms out, chest pushing her.

Even innocent kids like these scare us (Photo: Podknox)

She was terrified. I don't know whether they were going to hit her, but she thought so. I walked her home and told the boys to go away. They weren't big enough for me yet (I was morbidly obese at the time, which probably helped) and went off, looking pleased with themselves. I can't say I'd be so keen to step in if they were 14 or 15. I'd probably fake a heart attack, my instinctive reaction to violent situations.

On her doorstep I asked the old lady if she wanted to call the police. No point – she'd done so before, and they did nothing. The police takes these kids to their parents, but they can only punish crime, not bring up children. When they cross the line from badly behaved to criminal behaviour the police consider important enough to prosecute, as most do, then the police take action – too late of course. Ten or eleven is far, far too late to start socialisation – even four-year-olds in care are hard to place with families.

Only a couple of weeks ago Tanya Byron wrote in this paper that we as a nation are suffering from Ephebiphobia.

An ephebiphobic society is one that views young people in negative and judgmental terms, where the media report (with barely disguised glee) the latest hideous crimes and abuses of our young, which invents devices such as the Mosquito (which emits a high-frequency sound painful to the young) to move pestilent youths along.

I don't about know Byron, but I live in Haringey. I see what the kids are capable of every week; I saw my neighbour's face covered in blood after a group of teenagers – boys and girls – beat the hell out of him the other week for absolutely no reason. The week before last I saw an army of policemen separating warring school kids in Finsbury Park at going home time. These things happen all the time, and I live in a nice area. They happened when I was a teenager in the 1990s, and they've certainly got worse.

The liberals will wheel out Mary Bell once again to prove that child murders happen in all societies. Of course they do – but in 20 years we have seen a steep rise in violent crime by children, so that murders and incidents of bizarre and shocking torture are not even front page news. Forty years ago children were not committing gang rapes in classrooms, or beating each other to death in school playgrounds (if anyone can find evidence to the contrary, please tell me). How many incidents of violence can there be before it's accepted that these are not freaks of nature but clear results of a social experiment that has gone wrong?

In his excellent new book, The Rotten State of Britain, Eamonn Butler points out that throughout history every generation has complained about the next. What is new is a welfare state that has absolved parents, especially fathers, of responsibility for their offspring, a system that encourages unsuitable people to have children and then discard them (people who the RSPCA would not allow to keep pets), and one in which the law does not back up adults who discipline children.

The result of our glorious non-judgmental society is that in the past decade the number of children taken into care has risen by a fifth, to 60,000, with five times that number considered "in need", requiring some local authority help.

Children in care are four times more likely to have mental health problems than the population at large, girls in care are four times as likely to get pregnant within a year of leaving care as other girls their age, while ex-care children account for a third of Britain's homeless, a third of children in custody and a quarter of the adult prison population. And despite the Government spending £1bn on education for children in care over the past 10 years, only one in eight achieve 5 or more good GCSEs.

A phobia is an irrational fear, Miss Bryon. What's the Greek word for an inability to recognise a serious problem when it looks you in the eyes?